As is known, X-ray imaging devices currently on the market, regardless of the analysis performed (tomography, X-ray or fluoroscopy) have substantially the same basic structure. This structure provides a bed on which the patient is placed, a control station suitable to control the operation of the device; a gantry, O-shaped, defining a cavity in which the portion to be analysed is inserted and suitable to perform the radiological imaging of the patient; and a support supporting the gantry and the bed and able to mutually translate the bed and gantry. In detail, an X-ray source, a detector which receives the X-rays after they have passed through the bed, and the patient are positioned inside the gantry. Moreover, to perform a scan with different inclinations or a tomography, the radiological device has a rotation member which, by rotating the entire gantry or only the source and detector around the patient, makes it possible to perform scans at different angles.
The prior art mentioned above has several significant drawbacks. A first important drawback is that the radiological imaging devices currently available are particularly bulky. In fact, the gantry, having to contain the source, the detector and the rotation member, is particularly bulky. In fact, it has a diameter at least equal to 1.5 metres and is therefore unable to pass through doors or other accesses present in hospitals.
For this reason, if, for example, radiological imaging is used to check the outcome of an operation, the patient must be taken from the operating table, laid on a hospital bed, moved in the hospital to the room where the radiological imaging device is located, lifted again, and then laid on the bed of the device. This drawback is further increased by the need to make the source and detector rotate by an angular amplitude of at least 360°, which requires the use of complex and laborious rotation members.
One way to resolve these problems is to have the radiological devices developed with a C-shaped gantry, called a “C-arm,” which is composed of a solid C-shaped arched body at the ends of which the source and detector are integrally constrained, and a particular rotation member of the entire C-arm.
This solution, although solving in part the disadvantages set out above, has some important drawbacks. In fact, these radiological imaging devices are able to make the source and detector rotate only by a limited angular amplitude of not more than 200°. As a result, during the performance of a tomography, they are able to capture images only at a certain angle and thus perform a reconstruction of a radiographic image of reduced quality that is therefore difficult to read by the physician. As a result, these radiological imaging devices are often designed for a single function, usually only fluoroscopy, and thus have less functional flexibility. Moreover, the limited rotation does not allow the C-arm devices to perform scanning from any angle.
These drawbacks greatly limit the use of devices with a C-arm gantry, thus most of the radiological imaging devices currently in use are those with an O-gantry.